Marketing Your Business Value vs. Your Coding Skills

Business value#

A large genre of “Marketing for Developers” advice basically reduces you to an abstract business black box where your only role and value to the company is to grow revenue or reduce cost (or Die Trying?). I call this “marketing your business value”. Of course, this is technically correct. Technology is a means to an end, and ultimately, your employer has to cover costs and justify your salary. It is especially in your interest to help them justify as high a salary as possible.

Remember relevant data#

Have at your fingertips all the relevant statistics, data, quotes, and anecdotes for when you solved major product pain points or contributed a major revenue-generating/cost-saving feature. Julia Evans calls this a “Brag Document.” You should be able to recite your big wins on-demand and frame it in terms of what’s in it for them because you will probably have to. Managers and employers are well-intentioned and want to evaluate you fairly and objectively, but the topic of your contributions usually comes up completely without warning and out of context. Therefore, you want to put yourself on the best footing every time.

Applied personal branding#

Consider this “applied personal branding.” You’ll know you’ve succeeded when your boss can repeat everything you say you’ve accomplished to her boss and advocate for you as full-throated as you should do yourself. Make that easy. If you can, get it down to a concise elevator pitch — Patrick McKenzie is fond of citing a friend’s business value as "wrote the backend billing code that 97% of Google’s revenue passes through.” Enough said.

Personal branding vs. applied branding#

You might notice some differences between the general form of personal branding we discussed previously and this “applied” form of personal branding. They are different because you have different goals. With general personal branding, you are trying to be memorable and relatable. People want to get to know you, and people like the somewhat familiar (But not too familiar! Familiarity breeds contempt.) With applied personal branding, you are straightforwardly trying to sell yourself and help others sell you. Here you want to focus on unique achievements and traits, including highlighting notable successes.

Be just a little shameless. Nobody’s going to like fighting for you if you don’t show any interest in fighting for yourself.

Coding skills#

Unfortunately, “market your business value” is not at all helpful advice for people who have yet to make an attributable business impact through their work: code newbies and junior devs. Sometimes, even as a senior dev, you are still trying to market yourself to fellow devs. These two situations call for a different kind of marketing that is under-examined: marketing your coding skills.

Understand the psyche of your target audience#

To do this kind of marketing, you basically have to understand the psyche of your target audience: developers. What are they looking for?

Do cool things#

There are explicit requirements (those bullet points that companies list on job descriptions) and implicit requirements (subconscious biases and unnamed requirements). You can make it very complicated if you want to, but I think at the core, developers generally care about one thing: that you do cool shit. Some have an expansive definition of coding skills. Even if you’ve done something totally unrelated, they’ll easily assume you can pick up what you need later. Others need something closer to home, evidence you’ve done cool shit in a related tech stack.

Covered your bases#

If you’re marketing yourself for employment, the risk-averse will also want to know that you have also covered your bases. Covering your bases, along with the upside potential of hiring you because you’ve done cool shit, the downside risk of your being a bad hire is minimized. Do you know Git? Can you solve FizzBuzz? Is your code readable and well documented? If you have shepherded a non-trivial project from start to finish and have people, you can ask for references. If, instead, you’re just marketing your projects and ideas, the downside matters less — it’s easy to walk away.

See what is popular#

The definition of cool really depends on your taste, but people’s interests are broadly predictable in aggregate. If you look at tech sections of popular aggregator sites like Reddit and sort by, say, most upvoted posts in the past year, you can see patterns in what is popular. In fact, I’ve done exactly that for /r/reactjs!

Explain why your project is cool#

Even if your project is less visual and more abstract, you still need to explain to the average programmer why your project is cool - it solves a common/difficult problem or uses new technology, or it has desirable performance metrics. The best cool shit will be stuff you have been paid money for, put in production, and people can check outlive. If you don’t have that yet, you can always clone well-known apps (automatically cool), win a Hackathon (check out Major League Hacking), or Build Your Own X from Scratch, another popular developer genre.

Portfolios vs. proof of work#

Usually, the advice is to assemble your cool shit in a portfolio. Portfolios do two good things and two bad things.

Good things#

• They display your work easily and spell out the quick takeaways per piece-- you control your narrative!
• They help you diversify your appeal. If one project doesn’t spark interest, the next one might! In this sense, it is most like a stock portfolio — you’re diversifying risk rather than adding upside.

Bad things#

• They look skimpy without quantity - meaning you feel forced to go wide instead of go deep. quantity over quality.
• They overly bias toward flashy demos (which doesn’t really help if you’re not focusing on Frontend Dev/Design).

You can and should buy designs if design isn’t a skill you’re trying to market; it gives your projects an instant facelift, which is generally worth multiples of the <$100 that a premium design typically costs.

Portfolio driven development#

Some people plan their projects based on how they will look on a portfolio; this is the dreaded “portfolio driven development.” That lacks heart, and it will show when you talk about your projects at interviews and talks. Instead, pursue the projects that seem most interesting to you and figure out how to present them later. Your interest and enthusiasm when talking about them will go further than padding the portfolio.

Blogging#

In actual practice, there is a wide variety of devs and dev careers for which portfolios make no sense at all. Your humble author is one of them. You can market your coding skills in any number of more relevant ways, from doing major contributions and open source to being highly available surrounding a domain and blogging. The most general, default marketing skill is definitely blogging. You can write about any kind of technical topic in your blog.

Proof of work#

At the end of the day, what you really want to accomplish is demonstrating proof of work. Just like in a blockchain transaction, anyone checking you out should be able to instantly and trivially verify that you have worked on some very non-trivial things. When it comes to marketing in public, this is a business card, resume, and interview all rolled into one.